John

I have to deal with this kind of thing too for my class.

# 	Some functions
	# for ad$Full.name = "Mark Grimes"
	get.first.name <- function(cell){
	x<-unlist(strsplit(as.character(cell), " "))
	return(x[1]) 
	}
	get.last.name <- function(cell){
	x<-unlist(strsplit(as.character(cell), " "))
	return(x[2]) 
	}
	# For roster$Name = "Grimes, Mark L"
	get.first.namec <- function(cell){
	x<-unlist(strsplit(as.character(cell), ", "))
	y <- get.first.name(x[2])
	return(y) 
	}
	get.last.namec <- function(cell){
	x<-unlist(strsplit(as.character(cell), ", "))
	return(x[1]) 
	}
Use these functions with the apply family for processing class files. 

Hope this helps,

Mark

On Apr 6, 2012, at 9:09 AM, John D. Muccigrosso wrote:

> I have some data files in which some fields have multiple values. For example
> 
> first  last   sex   major
> John   Smith  M     ANTH
> Jane   Doe    F     HIST,BIOL
> 
> What's the best R-like way to handle these data (Jane's major in my example), so that I can do things like summarize the other fields by them (e.g., sex by major)?
> 
> Right now I'm processing the files (in excel since they're spreadsheets) by duplicating lines with two values in the major field, eliminating one value per row. I suspect there's a nifty R way to do this.
> 
> Thanks in advance!
> 
> John Muccigrosso
> 
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